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Kathleen Karlyn Rowe

“… women might begin to reweave the web of visual power that already binds them by taking the unruly woman as a model–woman as rule-breaker, joke-maker, and public, bodily spectacle…. Mary Russo notes that the category of the grotesque is often projected on the female body when it makes a spectacle of itself through… violation of proper feminine bodily containment. She asks how this category might be used ‘affirmatively to destabilize the idealizations of female beauty or to realign the mechanisms of desire’ (221). In acts of spectatorial unruliness (emphasis added), I believe, we might examine models of returning the male gaze, exposing and making a spectacle of the gazer, claiming the pleasure and power of making spectacles of ourselves, and beginning to negate our own invisibility in the public sphere.”